Project Accelerator Question 2: Importance of Personalization

I just got off the phone with Citrix helpdesk because I finally messed up my virtual desktop. I have a dedicated virtual desktop and I guess I installed/uninstalled too many things over the past few years. The same thing always happened to me with a traditional desktop. The good thing is that it only took the helpdesk a few moments to reset my virtual desktop to a base image and I didn’t have to sit and install Windows 7 and Office for the 100th time.

This experience got me to the next question from Project Accelerator: The importance of personalization.

We all know what personalization is. What rights you, as a user, have in altering the initial state of the desktop/application environment. Can you change a setting in an app? Can you install apps? Can you change OS-level settings? Can you even change the background (seriously???)

Why does personalization matter? We need to align the technical solution with the user requirements. In Project Accelerator, we break this down into three levels:

No personalization: User cannot modify any desktop or app setting (similar to a kiosk)

Complete personalization: User can make any change, including installing applications

Easy, just pick the one most appropriate for your users group. Let’s think hard about this because if you get this wrong, your users will be ready to revolt. Imagine you gave a user a pooled desktop. They installed an app. The next day, the app is gone. User thinks this is strange. Maybe I was under severe medications yesterday and I only imagined myself installing the app. So they do it again. Bam, next day, the app is gone. Now they start to get angry and they let you know about it.

This scenario plays out all the time. If you assess your users, you should understand what level of personalization they require. The “No Personalization” item is usually the easiest to identify as these users typcially make up a very specific use case. However, we often get into the debate between Basic and Complete. I say when in doubt, go with complete. Your users will be happier in the long term, which will probably make you happier as well.

As you can imagine, this one decision plays a big role in determining what kind of virtual desktop the user gets, but it does more than that. This one question influences:

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Daniel Feller is a Lead Architect at Citrix. With a app and desktop virtualization history dating back to 1997, Daniel has participated in many different deployments taking on many different roles. After graduating from Purdue University, Daniel started out as an IT Admin deploying WinFrame and MetaFrame 1.0. Daniel soon joined Citrix Consulting as one of the first consultants and spent many years working on some of the world's largest and most complex environments. In addition to field projects, Daniel has also authored several well known whitepapers like the XenDesktop Design Handbook and created the intricate logic behind Citrix Project Accelerator. Daniel can usually be seen speaking at conferences focusing on design topics for application and desktop virtualization.